Legion: S1E2: “Chapter 2”

Are you still trying to untie your mind from the knots of Legion’s first episode? Well, good, because the second episode slows down the tempo and does it focus on David Haller’s backstory. I was with the “Chapter 1” not going too in depth with it because as we forge into David’s psyche, you had to figure that more of the mystery was going to be investigated.

The opening takes us to Summerland, that is a place where mutants have gathered that is a parallel to the X-Mansion in the overall X-Men story line. The parallels don’t stop there, Melanie Bird (Jean Smart) is a therapist who have brought mutants like David and Sydney together. Melanie sees and believes in David’s powers and thinks that he can be the key. In the overall back lot of the story, there is a war going on between the government and mutants. You get the sense that Melanie wants to help David, but in later chapters, we may see that there is more of an insidious meaning behind it. In this world of broken fragments of reality, can we trust that anything is real? This is what David is constantly questioning himself with.

We also meet Ptonomy (Jeremie Harris) who has the ability to retrace memories or do “memory work.” Most of the episode is spent with him and Melanie working to find things that have happened in David’s past. One of the great nuisances of the episode is how certain things in the memory change – there may be a blurred out face here, an elevation of a voice juxtaposed with a conversation of a main person there. We all remember things different and there’s a real feeling of that here.

We get a glimpse of David’s childhood and we understand that there’s a mother and father with a face that we can’t make out. If you go by the comics, David’s real father is Professor X, but what became of his mother? “The Angriest Boy in the World,” depicts a violent murder that happens, so we will have to wait and see how this unfolds in future episodes. There’s also the business of the demon with the yellow eyes that keeps appearing. The demon only appears when David is disturbed or under duress like the scene with the MRI. Sydney has also seen the demon when she took over David’s body, so there is some credence that this thing is real. It may be one of the reasons that David himself is scared of opening the doors of his past because it’s instances where he loses control.

There’s three contrasts within the three women in David’s life – his sister Amy, Lenny, who we find had a friendship with David due to these flashbacks, and Sydney. Amy personifies family and the need for David wanting to have a normal life. Lenny lets his wild side go loose – doing drugs with him and such. Sydney is obviously David’s love interest, but also the gateway to finding out his true powers. He hears her thoughts almost by accident and it’s if she encourages him to accept who he is. Perhaps he isn’t crazy after all. If she’s even real to begin with…

The ending of the episode sees Amy get kidnapped by The Eye (Mackenzie Gray), which means that the government is not done with him yet. Chapter 2 scaled back the style and aesthetic tone of the first episode, but delivered with story telling that makes us want to dig in to the questions even more.